22-540 - Setting Knives W/O Jig

So I am making some saw dust and I go to turn on my 22-540 planer and I hear a crunch. I get a sick feeling knowing that I am either going to be out some time or money or both.

It turns out that the dust hood 50-359 shifted and was caught in the blade. The shroud is salvageable. However the blades need to be changed. I look up how to do this with out the knife setting jig. I cannot buy one because it is out of stock.

I quickly purchased a dial indicator and made a base to do the job. I did not know the elevation of the knives and I already took out the knives, so I did not have the old ones to reference. One poster on another forum said they called delta and they set the knives to 3mm above the head. This does not seam correct because the board had lots of snipe on the end and the rollers did not seam engaged. I kept looking and found these specs below that seam to make more sense. .065’’ x 2 to change from radius to diameter would be 3.3mm. I will try it again tomorrow.

3 comments so far

Apparently there is some lee way in the height of the cutters. I have the planer pal and it just attaches to the drum with magnets.The info on the Amazon page says this:“For setting knives on 10-Inch – 13-Inch planers with 1-7/8-Inch to 2-1/8-Inch cutter heads”